ΠΟΣΑ ΠΑΙΡΝΕΙ Η ΚΑ ΛΑΓΚΑΡΝΤ;

•   by Kristina Chew
•   May 29, 2012
•   12:41 pm

Last week, Christine Lagarde, the director of the International Monetary Fund, told Greeks they need to pay their taxes to get out of the economic crisis that has put the country into five years of recession and resulted in unemployment of over 50 percent for Greeks in their twenties. Lagarde’s language was condescending; she clearly stated that she reserves her sympathy for children in sub-Saharan Africa but “as far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time.”
Lagarde’s comments appeared in a Guardian interview whose main topic was the austerity measures that the “troika” of the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank have insisted Greece — and other hard-hit countries including Ireland, Portugal and Spain — follow to receive bailout funds. As an article in today’s Guardian reveals, Lagarde herself pays no tax on her $467,940 a year salary and her $83,760 yearly allowance.
That is, Lagarde — the former finance minister of France who became IMF head after Dominique Strauss-Kahn resigned when he was charged with sexual attacking a hotel maid in New York and who was before that the partner of a Chicago law firm — “receives a pay and benefits package worth more than American president Barack Obama earns from the United States government, and he pays taxes on it.”
Lagarde is no “tax dodger,” NPR emphasizes. Under article 34 of the Vienna convention on diplomatic relations of 1961, “A diplomatic agent shall be exempt from all dues and taxes, personal or real, national, regional or municipal.”
Indeed, Lagarde is entitled to a raise of 1 percent every year during her five-year contract, as well as to other benefits: “rent subsidies, dependency allowances for spouses and children, education grants for school-age children and travel and shipping expenses, as well as subsidised medical insurance.”
As Alex Hern writes in the New Statesman,
it seems like a good rule of thumb that if you do not pay any tax, you do not get to tell other people off for not paying tax. Especially if you earn around twenty times the median wage of the country you are telling off.
The Guardian also observes that more than a few critics have questioned how executives for the IMF, the World Bank and the UN can “live large at international taxpayers’ expense.” As justification for the high salaries, the organizations have argued that such are necessary to attract talented individuals from the private sector. But that argument falls flat when you consider most of those organizations’ senior employees are “recruited from government posts.”
With all this in mind, Lagarde is being a “slight hypocrite” at least as the New Statesman puts it. One thing to tell people pay their taxes, another thing to pay your own (or to be in a position in which you do not have to pay them at all).

Read more: https://www.care2.com/causes/imf-director-lagarde-doesnt-pay-taxes.html#ixzz1wOR9tToR